Blogs

Performance monitoring prevents unnecessary over-provisioning

By John Gentry, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances –

For too many organizations, peak traffic times come with higher latency that leaves a negative impression with the end user. No one wants to wait for anything these days. So in a world where overprovisioning is always the norm but not the best solution, what’s an IT team to do? It’s time for these groups to start recognizing the value in more granular performance monitoring and optimization right at the infrastructure’s root. Performance monitoring achieves the following goals that make it a better solution than blind overprovisioning:

Identifies the true obstacle.

Real-time performance monitoring, rather than simply throwing more money at a problem, gets to the root cause for higher-than-expected latency periods and points out areas for improvement. There may well be areas of congestion, but simply making an ecosystem bigger is a costly patch that may not solve the actual problem. Leveraging modern performance monitoring tools that cull data from a number of places and produce actionable analytics will give workers a better understanding of their entire landscape, and where there are actual fixes to be made in the core of the infrastructure.

Prevents unnecessary spending.

That mandate calling for cost optimization is easier to reach when using performance monitoring because IT staff have access to more information about the functionality of the platforms on which they rely. Overprovisioning to increase capacity during busier periods requires financial investment that simply isn’t necessary. Any time money is wasted, someone is going to have to answer for that. Directing funds to performance monitoring is more efficient than just increasing bandwidth.

Keeps IT operations efficient.

There will likely come a time for expanding an IT ecosystem. A bigger infrastructure is necessary during times of major traffic growth, and that’s usually a good thing for most companies. However, premature overprovisioning in the name of a quick fix to a problem will make an infrastructure inefficient when growth is necessary. Save that step for when it’s really the right move, and solidify your IT foundation in the meantime.

Aside from the unnecessary costs sunk into larger-than-necessary systems, a massive infrastructure is more to manage for a department that is already failing to operate as efficiently as possible. Infrastructure performance management (IPM) points to the root of unexpected latency increases and helps businesses find the original causes of their problems so they can fix them efficiently.